/sci/ - Science & Math

it would have gotten too small and flaccid by that point, you could rupture the membrane but it wouldn't "pop." There's an old scuba gimick where you blow up a balloon then take it down ~50 feet, then when you get down there you blow up another one and take it back up.

>>4222695

how'd you do it?

>>4222687

bah, meant sin^-1 / arcsin

A messy but easy way is to just to use the first to get A as sin(-1) the rest, then plug that into the second, then solve for B, then plug in.

>>4222515

ISSN: 17930057
FREEMAN W. THE NEUROBIOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF NATURAL COMPUTING:: INTENTIONALITY. New Mathematics & Natural Compuation [serial online]. March 2009;5(1):19-29. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA.

If you want something just on digit misplacement you might need to do further reading, that's more on the general computation processes.

>>4222504

Some journal did a special issue dedicated to his life and work, I think it was in there. Neuroanatomy isn't my field, I came upon it on a side project for my own amusement. I still have the paper I wrote, I'll see if I can track it down and check the citations

If you want to see something cool, look up how base 10 calculations are intrinsically tied to brain function. "We count on ten fingers so that's why everyone is base 10" is an overly simplistic and incorrect way to look at it, the neuroanatomy goes a lot deeper than that. The sensorimotor areas that track the fingers are actually used to create initial digit computations, so if someone (for instance) has "finger dyslexia," a condition where they can't distinguish and track their fingers independently, it will also manifest itself in difficulties with basic counting.

Walter J. Freeman III, the most impressive human being alive, has a lot of research on it

>>4222264

You need some metric that you both agree on then. We can't really provide that, at best we could make suggestions but you'd have to make sure that your opponent agrees on that. Go for some sort of naive utilitarianism I guess.

You can't define "good" and "bad" in terms of other things without losing its independent meaning. You can describe classes and kinds of actions AS good or bad, but that seems like a very different kind of endeavor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

Bad name by the way.

Which of the major foundations of mathematics do you endorse and why?

Captcha: which iespress

>>4222004

My current research program is being done in concert with my university's chemistry program. I haven't just taken classes in chemistry, I've had my name published in chemistry journals. You realize that I was defending chemistry's validity as an independent field, right?

I never said that chemistry could not involve complex mathematics. I said that many of the basic concepts used cannot currently be expressed as purely mathematical expressions. This is true.

>>4221957

Are those scores for everyone who took the test or just people who got into med schools? Source?

I didn't mean to start a shitstorm when I asked what was wanted by significance. I just meant that I wasn't sure if the pendulum deflection would be interesting enough.

>>4221881

It just refers to the desire by other sciences, especially the softer ones, to be able to express their basic ideas and rules in mathematical formulas the way that physics can. It's only as derisive as people choose to take it (though to be fair, a lot of people are dicks about it).

>>4221857

There's still a lot of concepts in biology and especially chemistry that are just fundamentally not understood very well in a fully rigid fashion. Even basic things encountered at an undergraduate level have strongly competing theories to model them, with no clear winner one way or another or clear way to describe them- I'm a physicist so my personal knowledge is a little limited, but I know that orbital hybridization is still not fully understood. We also still don't know a hell of a lot about how cells work, the processes and structures involved are far too complex to just throw physical subatomic models at to magically unravel.

I'm also not sure why you think that systems biology "is coming to the rescue," it stresses more heuristic, qualitative analysis over pure quantitative formulations than reductivism ever did.

>>4221900

That's true, but you shouldn't be confusing undergraduate biology with what's representative of the subfields. There's definitely segments of biology that require heavy mathematics. Of course things like population biology don't require much beyond partial differential equations and some topology, but why would they? It's no failing with the research paradigms.

>>4221802

That didn't take nearly as long as I thought

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiehallion_experiment

It's actually kind of cool, as is its later impact on cartography. I'm not sure what your criteria is for an object pulling on another one "significantly."

>>4221785

I feel like I read something once about the earth's mass being calculated by the gravitational disturbance on pendulums swung near mountains, I'd have to google into it though.

Converting to polar coordinates is easier, if you don't want to do that though just convert cos^2 (y) to 1/2 + 1/2cos(2y).

Look up the half angle formula if you want to check that.

All work out?

>>4221743

Chemistry isn't really applied physics to any sensible extent. In principle it should be reducible to particle physics, but we don't have andthing close to the understanding of the universe we'd need to actually express much of the important concepts in chemisty in terms of contemporary physics.

Biology and chemistry both have what's usually called "physics envy," the desire to fully mathematize and become as rigid as physics is. Right now we can't, because we don't understand what's being studied well enough.

Also, this

http://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citation
s/

Really worth reading

This is 100% my own supposition and really dependent on the actual demographics of the board, but it seems like a lot of the hate I see amongst myself and people I know in uni is due to pre-med kids. A lot of us have to TA their mandatory classes or at the least were in core classes with them early on as an undergrad; early on before the major killswitch classes start going off (lolorgolol) the programs tend to be flooded with kids who are relatively uninterested with any sort of intellectualism and are still used to the "memorize formulas, study hard and apply self to the material at hand to get As; otherwise complain" method that served them well earlier in education. These kids are often biology majors.

I was also a pre-med concentration for a semester or two, which I think further reinforced my hatred. Then I started teaching early university physics and it got driven into the core of my soul.

>>4221039

Experiment as in you want to do an experiment in class, or that you want to report on a cool experiment scientists have done?

If the former, what's your budget like?

>>4220956

To be fair I didn't actually take highschool level math in England (I had a summer long internship there during uni), I just could have sworn that it was a common term there as well. I suppose I could be wrong.

Do you have any idea if your university textbooks tend to be the same as ours?

>>4220955

What exactly do you mean by "science" then? I'd imagine that talking about scientific theories would be included, even if those theories are now outdated.

>>4220873

Not all moons are round actually.

The reason why large astronomical objects (and balloons, and bubbles) are round is due to something called hydrostatic equlibrium. Planets are actually a really simple model for this.

Pretend that the only forces acting on the material of a planet are gravity and the material's resistance to being crushed (which is actually pretty close to the truth). Gravitational attraction exists between all points of the mass, and its strength in a given direction is proportional to the amount of mass in that direction and inversely proportional to the distance from that mass. Pressure (resistance to being crushed) will stop it from collapsing into a singularity. Thus, it's easy to see that a ball represents the most equalized shape the object can adopt under those forces, if it was a cube for instance then there would be an unequal pull down at each one of the corners, and it would gradually flatten out into a ball.